A Look Back at Summer

Child of my Heart by Alice McDermott (2002, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr (1980, reissued by New York Review of Books in 2000)

Word on Fire’s Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know is the gift that keeps on giving. When I reviewed it here in July, I was only familiar with half of the novelists featured, leaving me with an excellent list of good things to read. Since June, my husband and I have visited six used bookstores in four different states, where I’ve been cruising for titles by Muriel Spark and Alice McDermott.

Set in what might be the nineteen-seventies, McDermott’s Child of my Heart is the story of fifteen-year-old Theresa, an only child growing up in Long Island among the summer homes of the rich. Theresa is beautiful and on the cusp of adulthood— “I believe my parents had grown a little wary of me by then” –and she works tirelessly all summer, caring for children and pets while her mother and father commute to the city. In addition to her paying clients, Theresa keeps an eye on Petey Moran, one of a large and neglected brood of children living next door. Petey spends enough nights sleeping in the yard outside Theresa’s bedroom window that her parents have considered calling Child Protective Services. But in the morning, they just give him breakfast, pretending he’s only dropped over. Daisy, an eight-year-old cousin, arrives from Queens Village to stay with Theresa for a few weeks, bringing a suitcase full of brand-new and ill-fitting outfits and one very special pair of impractical shoes. Theresa takes Daisy up to the attic, where her own parents have preserved all of her childhood clothes. As they pick out a few things for Daisy to wear, Theresa lays claim to the memory of a prior existence. “’You don’t remember God?’” Theresa asks. “’Or heaven? Or the angels? Or the other children waiting to be born?’” When Daisy demurs, Theresa goes on to insist that she has always remembered the name of a brother of hers who had died before she was born. “Clearly, I said, my brother and I had met, and exchanged names, sometime between his birth and mine.”

Theresa takes Daisy on her rounds, walking dogs and picking up Flora, the toddler daughter of an elderly artist and his beautiful, vulgar wife. Early in the novel, Flora’s mother takes off for the city, leaving Flora in the hands of a jealous French maid who sets her out on the porch every morning strapped in a stroller, a bottle of Hawaiian Punch hanging out of her mouth. Theresa cares tenderly for Flora, but she also attracts the attention of Flora’s father, who spends most of his days in his art studio drinking. Other men leer at Theresa as she minds their children on the beach or by the pool.

There were things in this book that had never occurred to me, and things in which I immediately saw myself. In the mornings, Theresa eats peaches on the front porch while she finishes her book, rinsing her hands and mouth with dew. A lover of Shakespeare, she nicknames a pair of twins Cobweb and Peaseblossom, and she invites Daisy to do fanciful things that are not done at home. Eat the center out of your English muffin with jelly, she tells her, and then wear it like a ring so you can nibble it later. When a dog takes it from her in one bite, the day is sealed in her memory, along with its heat and freedom and promise. Theresa knows in her heart that something is desperately wrong with Daisy. But if she tells anyone, Daisy will have to go home.

The elderly artist, meanwhile, wonders whether he has made anything that will last. Most of his work is ugly and abstract, but three beautiful mother-and-child drawings hang above Flora’s crib—drawings that belie the neglect of the mother, the cupidity of the father.

I glanced at the three sketches in their gold frames and considered what their worth might be, when they had been claimed by the future and all that was pretty and charming about them was transformed by all that had intervened—the infant grown into a troubled woman, the mother never returned, the father and all his efforts turned to dust. But then, I supposed, with more time, all that would be forgotten as well, and they would once again be charming and pretty portraits of a mother and child—not a biography, as Macduff might have said, but a novel.

I found I preferred modern art, pictures of nothing, after all.                

This may sound a bit jaded, but perhaps it is only the speech of a prescient young woman who has seen through a weak older man. Near the end of Daisy’s visit, Theresa sees Daisy “carrying [a] gaudy kite on her back to keep the wind from bending it. A modern-art version, it seemed to me, of angel wings.” She is not the only one who comes to love Daisy on her short visit; long after the cataclysm at the end of the book, Petey Moran brings a box full of baby rabbits over to Theresa’s house.

I knew without asking that this was Petey’s gift, indistinguishable as it was from a burden. Petey, who always used to ask, challenging and pleading at the same time, ‘Do you like me? Do you like my family?’ Who had wept with his fists tight. Who would be plagued all his life by anger and affection, by gifts gone awry, by the irreconcilable difference between what he got and what he longed for—by the inevitable, insufferable loss buried like a dark jewel at the heart of every act of love.

Like Child of my Heart, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country captures the fleeting essence of a long-ago watershed summer. I don’t know if Carr is considered a religious writer; but in this 1980 novel, he takes up questions of faith, sectarianism, and the power of art to bring us closer to the Divine. As Michael Holroyd puts it in his introduction, “A Month in the Country is a novel of resurrection.”

Shortly after the Great War, Tom Birkin, an art restorer and veteran with a severe facial tic, sets up residence in the belfry of a church in the village of Oxgodby, in Yorkshire. He has been hired by the vicar, John Keach, to uncover a medieval mosaic of the Last Judgment. A local widow has left a bequest to the church on two conditions: 1) restore the mosaic, and 2) find the grave of an ancestor of hers who was buried outside of consecrated ground. A man named Moon, who is employed for this second purpose, is secretly mapping out the foundational remains of an ancient basilica with the intention of publishing his findings—though he will get around to locating the ancestor eventually. He lives in a tent on the property and befriends Birkin as a fellow veteran of the war.

Tom’s work attracts frequent observers, including the fourteen-year-old daughter of Mr. Ellerbeck, the stationmaster. Soon, Tom is invited to tea at the Ellerbeck home on Sunday afternoons; he finds himself recruited as an umpire for cricket and as an assistant at Sunday school. Mr. Ellerbeck doubles as a Wesleyan preacher, and once, when he is expected to visit three far-flung churches in a single day, he sends Tom Birkin himself as a substitute. This fraternization with the Wesleyans earns Tom no points with the Reverend Keach, whose beautiful wife Alice also visits Tom at his work.

Carr’s book deliberately recalls Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of life in the English countryside. Near the end of the summer, Tom joins a hay wagon ride—a “Sunday school treat” for the Wesleyans—that might have been lifted from the pages of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

And so we clattered off, calling farewell to those disqualified by infirmity or alien beliefs from joining us, conscious (as they were) that we were part of the ancient cycle of the farming year and that our passing was token that the harvest was almost in.

Tom, whose own wife has left him, falls in love with Alice Keach, prompting the vicar to pay Tom what he is owed and dismiss him from the work. Tom counters that, if he is forced to leave now, he will tell the lawyers he was prevented from finishing, voiding the widow’s bequest. But while Tom’s love for Alice necessarily entails a denial of Keach as a man, the vicar has the last word.

The English are not a deeply religious people. … They do not need me. I come in useful at baptisms, weddings, funerals. Chiefly funerals—they employ me as a removal contractor to see them safely flitted into their last house. … But I am embarrassing you, Mr. Birkin,’ he said. ‘You too have no need for me. You have come back from a place where you have seen things beyond belief, things which you cannot talk of yet can’t forget, but things which are at the heart of religion.

Tom has numerous meaningful encounters in Oxgodby, but there’s an argument to be made that the key relationship in the book is between Tom and the unknown artist who created the mural. “Who was he? I couldn’t even name him. People don’t seem to understand those far-off folk. They simply weren’t us. Our idea of personal fame was alien to them.” But here is Tom, packing to leave and mourning the end of the summer:

Last of all, I gazed beyond the scaffolding to the great painting half hidden in the shadows. Truthfully, I felt nothing much. …Then (and I can’t explain it) the numbness went and I knew that, whatever else had befallen me during those few weeks in the country, I had lived with a very great artist, my secret sharer of the long hours I’d labored in the half-light above the arch.

Tom might not describe this as a religious experience, but what else could it be? He is attracted, even transformed, by the good, the true, and the beautiful–and by the end of a marvelous watershed summer.

In Search of Community

Haley Stewart, Ed. Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know (Word on Fire, 2024)

An as-yet unpublished novel of mine once found its way into the hands of a literary agent for consideration. It’s about a young woman in a high-powered job who is unfaithful to her husband and makes quite a mess of her life. In a moment of crisis, she enters a church, where she has a transformative encounter with a Catholic priest.

I waited eagerly for the agent’s response. And while the answer was no, she kindly offered her feedback. Though she had wanted to like my book, she thought the pivotal scene with the priest was ridiculous; and by the end, she disliked the main character so much that she wished she’d get hit by a bus.

Needless to say, I went back to the drawing board. But for years after that, as I sent out my writing, I tried to keep my Catholic faith under the radar.

How wonderful, then, to discover that a vibrant culture of Catholic writers and publishers was already emerging right under my nose. My first real inkling came from a Facebook post promoting Katy Carl’s novel, As Earth Without Water (Carl’s essay on Rumer Godden is featured in Women of the Catholic Imagination). I was astonished and thrilled to read such a nuanced and beautiful story of an artist discerning a religious vocation. And as it turns out, there are many excellent works of fiction in this vein, both contemporary and classic. Some of them I knew, and some, I didn’t. For instance, did you know that Nobel-Prize winner Toni Morrison was a Catholic, and that her books can be read fruitfully in this light? How about Donna Tartt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch?

Women of the Catholic Imagination not only delineates the Catholicity of some of the writers we know; it also introduces many once well-known writers whose work still deserves to be read. According to Bonnie Lander Johnson, British novelist Alice Thomas Ellis’s “large and eccentric Gloucester Terrace household was well-known for its conflation of home life, writing, painting and publishing; in this convergence of activity, Ellis’s home has been compared to the Bloomsbury Group.” I’ve just finished the first book in Ellis’s Summerhouse Trilogy, and it’s great. Julia Meszaros has this to say about Caryll Houselander: “the artist [is] perhaps the last person left to witness to the beauty of doing something for its own sake, no matter the cost.” And I’d never heard of German writer Gertrud von le Fort, but Helena M. Tomko’s description of her accords with my own experience of writing fiction:

’Creative power can only be received,’ writes le Fort. She sees this as a feminine capacity and corrective to the masculine impulse toward ‘self-redemption’ and self-creation. Her understanding of Marian co-redemption is exemplary for men and women alike, who ‘must conceive the creative spirit in the sign of Mary, in humility and surrender, or he [and she] will not receive it at all.’

As you may have already gathered, Women of the Catholic Imagination is full of great writing. Dorian Speed introduces Scottish writer Muriel Spark like this:

Half a century before Jim Carrey walked off the set of The Truman Show or Will Farrell negotiated with the novelist pulling the strings of his life story in Stranger than Fiction, Caroline Rose (a Spark character) heard her own thoughts being typed out by an unseen author.

How cool is that? I recently attended a Catholic Literary Arts panel called “Writing While Catholic,” and Dorian Speed, who was one of the panelists, characterized good fiction as a place where wounded characters receive God’s grace through their interaction with others. This exactly describes the kind of stories I want to write and read.

In addition to the writers mentioned above, Women of the Catholic Imagination includes essays on Josephine Ward, Sigrid Undset, Flannery O’Connor, Caroline Gordon, and Alice McDermott. By my count, seven of the twelve writers featured are Catholic coverts and one is an English recusant, so there’s a wonderful diversity in their stories of faith.  And beyond that, it’s refreshing to see how many of my favorite contemporary Catholic poets and fiction-writers are also very fine essayists and critics. Some of them, including Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, Katy Carl, and Joshua Hren, contributed essays to this book. Women of the Catholic Imagination is a great place to meet these writers, too.

Revisiting Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

I have a distinct image of myself newly graduated from college, lying in the top bunk in a friend’s house in Sweden and finishing Jude the Obscure in the long, otherworldly June daylight. Thirty-six years have passed since then; my husband and I have raised three children to adulthood. And this month, I revisited Jude the Obscure to divine the shadow it cast on my reading of Brideshead Revisited (more on that here). But like any great novel revisited after so many years, the story opened for me in a whole new way. Now, I read Jude the Obscure as a book about mental illness—specifically depression, though the book also deals with scrupulosity.

There are a few striking similarities between Brideshead and Jude: both stories involve moral scruples surrounding divorce, and both take place in part in great university towns (Oxford in Brideshead, the fictional Christminster in Jude). But while Waugh’s Charles Ryder can afford to attend university, Jude, who is of the peasant class, tutors himself in the hope of gaining admittance one day. When a coarse young woman named Arabella entraps Jude into marriage, he takes a surprisingly progressive view of sexual mores:

There seemed to him…something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancellation of well-formed schemes involving years of thought and labour… because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness.

This is the second time Jude is inclined to discard social norms—the first is when he resolves to be educated beyond his own class–and Jude’s many reversals exacerbate his depressive tendencies, particularly toward alcohol. The fickle Arabella soon leaves, and Jude, who is trained as a stonemason, moves to Christminster, where his more educated cousin Sue Bridehead also lives. Jude’s great-aunt warns him strictly not to contact Sue; there is some sort of curse on his family, she says, and the Fawleys oughtn’t to marry. Jude cannot offer himself to his cousin in any case, because he is not free.

When Jude arrives in Christminster after dark, he feels completely detached: “[k]nowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard.” Soon, Jude is aware of unseen presences: “There were poets abroad;” ‘Speculative philosophers drew along;” “The scientists and philologists followed.” But, in the morning, “the colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances.”

It isn’t long before Jude encounters his cousin and becomes enamored of her, though it takes him a while to unveil his identity. When Sue finally writes to him, he offers to meet her “at the cross in the pavement which marked the spot of the Martyrdom.” It is Sue who recognizes just how inauspicious this meeting place is. They start out as friends; Jude introduces his cousin to his old schoolmaster Mr. Phillotson, whose example has drawn Jude to Christminster in the first place. Phillotson has not made a success of himself, and when Sue comes to teach at his school, he falls in love with her. Sue has always been flighty and delicate; she has a fine mind, but she lacks the courage of her convictions. When she learns that Jude is already married, she impulsively accepts Phillotson’s offer—though she develops such an aversion to him once they are married that he is at last moved to release her. Sue and Jude drift from place to place in what appears on the surface to be a free-spirited and illicit union, though they live chastely together for years.

Jude the Obscure is full of remarkably modern speeches. Sue says that she “’may hold the opinion that, in a proper state of society, the father of a woman’s child will be as much a private matter of hers as the cut of her underlinen, on whom nobody will have any right to question her.’” Such anti-family ideas are socially ruinous; and yet Jude tries to placate her. “’That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.’” (Later, as Jude is losing his faith, he will accuse Sue of wanting to save her own soul at the expense of his.)

And while Phillotson suffers for his renunciation of Sue, Jude’s Arabella inconveniently reappears. She wants Jude to divorce her so she can properly marry the man she has been living with in Australia. And she announces that Jude has a son whom he must immediately take off her hands.

“Little Father Time,” as the boy is known, is a morose child who seems like an old man. His silent advent on the train is absolutely terrifying; in his melancholy nature, he takes after Jude: 

[h]e was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through crevices. A ground-swell from ancient years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic of Time, and appeared not to care about what it saw.

The child’s arrival brings out Sue’s latent scrupulosity concerning her flight from her unhappy marriage. Her “supersentiveness [is] disturbed” when the boy comes; Jude “[finds] her in the dark, bending over an armchair.” And yet Sue promises to be a mother to him, though his resemblance to Arabella incites a horror in her. The child asks,

“is it you who’s my real mother, at last?” … Then a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry. She thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.

Meanwhile, Jude writes to the heads of the various colleges in Christminster to ask if there are any funds set aside for the education of one such as him. The only one who deigns to reply advises Jude to remain content in his own class. But it becomes harder and harder for Jude to find work as people gossip about his unconventional family, which has now grown to include two younger siblings and a child on the way. Little Father Time absorbs these concerns, as Sue makes no attempt to hide anything from him.

“I couldn’t bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn’t truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely. – Why was I half-wiser than my fellow-women? … It was my want of self-control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!”

Jude and Sue are well-attuned to one another’s moods and can adjust for them, but the child has no such coping skills. The family makes its way back to Christminster in time for Remembrance Day so that Jude, who is quite ill by now, can indulge in self-reproach at his failure to enter the college. But when the family is unable to secure adequate lodgings together, Little Father Time brings about an unthinkable tragedy. As Jude will say later,

“[t] he doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last generation—the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”

How prescient this seems in light of the dangerous influences young children are exposed to today!

Unlike Charles Ryder, who turns toward Christianity at the end of Brideshead Revisited, Jude loses his faith when Sue drifts away from him.

“You make me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it may be called, if it’s that which has caused this deterioration in you. That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like a diamond—whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of, if they could have known you—should degrade herself like this! I am glad I had nothing to do with Divinity—damn glad—if it’s going to ruin you in this way!”

Of course, it is not Christianity per se that has caused this “deterioration” in Sue; she suffers terribly from scrupulosity over past sins. Some might say that the times simply haven’t caught up to her yet. But today’s moral laxity doesn’t support human flourishing, either.

The tragic ending of Jude is so much darker than the ending of Brideshead, and yet it does not disturb my expectations at all. I had no wish to see things turn out happily in the end, perhaps because Hardy’s sensibility feels more like the naturalism of Zola: the self-interested Arabella, having exploited Jude’s grief, lures the lascivious Dr. Vilbert with his own “love-philtre” before Jude is cold on his deathbed, while the terrible grief to which Sue is subjected deranges her thoughts. Sue and Jude have been gradually changing places, as he loses his faith while she finds a scrupulous one. There is more straightforward tragedy here, while perhaps Brideshead aims to have it both ways.

And yet you might say that Julia’s choice at the end of Brideshead Revisited–a choice that honors the Catholic understanding of marriage–revisits (and thereby corrects) Sue Bridehead’s tragic, disordered choices in Jude the Obscure. Waugh looks clear-eyed at the world with a true faith, while Hardy quotes Swinburne’s Hymn to Proserpine: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Gallilean; the world has gone grey from thy breath.”

And that’s a pagan poem I can hardly bear to read.

On (mis)reading Brideshead Revisited

Note: This post contains spoilers.

I’ve belonged to various book clubs over the years, but I’ve generally fallen away after being asked to read a few things I didn’t enjoy. Well Read Moms is refreshingly different. There’s a yearly theme and a guide, and I love the idea that spiritual book clubs all over the country are reading in tandem together. Our own group developed organically out of a few years of parish-based Lenten group study, so last summer, I was really excited to discuss Works of Mercy by Sally Thomas with some of my dearest spiritual friends. And we all loved Marly Youmans’s Charis in the World of Wonders. But I must confess that, despite the excellent commentaries that were provided for us, we struggled a bit with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. (This did, however, create an opportunity for one of us to study up and give an excellent tutorial on the poems–and she wasn’t even an English major in college!)

And now, we come to the great Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited has long been a favorite of mine, but I’m having some trouble with the ending. My idiosyncratic reading of Brideshead is probably formed by at least two other great books: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s characters grapple with church teaching on marriage and sexuality just as Waugh’s do. And in an amazing coincidence (but is it coincidence, really?) Hardy’s counterpart to Waugh’s Julia Flyte is named Sue Bridehead!

But more on that later. The influence of Swann’s Way has to do, of course, with the taste of the madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea (suffice it to say that, in Proust, any episode of involuntary memory is a good thing). As Aunt Leonie’s house rises up like a stage set around the narrator of Swann’s Way–bringing with it the rooftops and church bells and cobblestone streets of Combray, where the narrator spent much of his childhood–so too rises Brideshead Castle for me as Charles and Sebastian round the bend in Hardcastle’s borrowed car. For me, the house carries all the attractions of nostalgia, and at first, the Brideshead of Charles’s past appears to stand in for the good, the true, and the beautiful–for those youthful interwar years when Charles, wearied now by his pointlessly bureaucratic military life, was discovering friendship at Oxford. This, of course, is a misreading of Brideshead, though perhaps one that Waugh might permit for the earliest pages. It is only after the house is disrupted by war, becoming a place for soldiers to billet—only after Lord Marchmain has died, and the chapel is restored—that Life comes back to the house.

Near the end, the coming war presses hard on the story’s main characters. It is the war that brings Lord Marchmain home from Italy to die, just in time to ruin everything not only for Charles and Julia, but for Bridey and Beryl. Lord Marchmain demands that the “queen’s bed” be brought down for him piece by piece and reassembled in the Chinese parlor; he disparages Beryl and threatens to write Bridey out of the will; and at first, he dismisses the priest who comes to offer the last sacraments. The war presses on Julia, too, hurrying her along the path of divorce and remarriage that will ultimately separate her from Charles. And, finally, it is the war, and Charles’s rather pointless role in it, that makes him world-weary and sad. Frankly, until the last two sentences, Charles doesn’t sound at all like a man who has discovered the spiritual life.

I know I ought to rejoice when Lord Marchmain finally makes the sign of the cross on his deathbed. And I do rejoice–though probably not as much as I should–when Julia finally stops fending off the Hound of Heaven who has so graciously separated her from her sin. And I’m happy for Charles at the end of the book as he kneels before the tabernacle in the chapel, where the Eucharist has been restored. (I feel sure that the shell-shocked old priest who reopens the chapel at Brideshead is a stand-in for Sebastian, who is living out his days as an alcoholic eccentric in a Tunisian monastery.)

In other words, I know that the book ends in grace. But that’s not how I feel. Instead, I feel like something terrible and tragic has happened. When Julia renounces Charles, who says he hopes that her heart will break, I’m completely on his side. I find myself asking, why can’t she get an annulment? After all, her marriage to Rex took place outside the Catholic church, and Rex had been married before. As for Charles–well, if either party entered into Charles’s first marriage without proper intent, it was probably him. Oh, never mind. I just want things to work out! I want consolation in the form of a happier ending; perhaps I ought to try harder to accept desolation instead. But it just seems to me that the “severe mercy” of Sheldon Vanauken’s novel of grief is pretty severe in Brideshead. It’s a severe mercy indeed for Charles to know that Julia lives, and that she has turned away from him for the good of them both.

And if Charles is going to believe and convert, shouldn’t there be more joy in it for him? Instead, the war comes, and the house is ruined, and Julia and Cordelia both enter into a hard, bleak life. And yes, Charles has had the advantage of years to get over the fresh wound of losing Julia. The book’s very last sentence– “You’re looking cheerful today!” –briefly gestures at joy. But I took very seriously the bleak opening in the prologue about the age of Hooper and Charles’s lack of real purpose; I took seriously Charles’s lament that at thirty-nine, he began to be old. A ruined Brideshead with a restored chapel is a beautiful thing, I know. But I still cherish that nostalgic vision that opens the book–especially after the war requisitions the house and makes it quite certain that Charles and Julia will run out of time.

Cathartic, isn’t it? Maybe my reading (I do believe; help my unbelief!) isn’t so far off after all. I’ll have more to say about Thomas Hardy next month.

Poems and Vignettes

Memory’s Abacus by Anna Lewis (Wiseblood Books, 2024)

The title poem of Anna Lewis’s debut collection waxes and wanes on the page. A grandmother with “swollen knuckles” recites the names of her cousins, some of whom are long dead; and as she speaks, she

taps on the

Christmas tablecloth as if

there lay memory’s abacus.

In its simplicity, this poem is hardly more than a string of names, like beads on a necklace; and yet Lewis beautifully locates the evanescent—whether it be a memory, an experience, a resemblance, or an insight–within the concrete image. In “Childhood Home,” the speaker remembers her Babinka tugging a branch of the dogwood tree

down close to give a look:

the rusty stains at petal’s edge

denoted holy wounds;

the bristling core, a crown of thorns;

the Passion in a bloom.

Like St. Patrick explaining the Holy Trinity with the leaves of a shamrock, Babinka’s perhaps inadvertent tutelage imprints on the child’s mind, where it is interwoven with nostalgia for a house “full of stairs and doors.”

Section II of the collection beautifully explores the triolet, an eight-line poem that achieves its effect using formal repetition. Lines one, four and seven are identical or nearly identical, as are lines two and eight, and the rhyme scheme is tightly limited. But changing context reveals new facets of each repeating line, as if one were turning a diamond to catch the light. Collectively titled “Reveries of a Mother on Foot,” the forty triolets of Memory’s Abacus are in a sense a single poem. A mother pushes her sleeping infant in a stroller, freeing her to think her own thoughts. “Beneath our humid, morning sky, I splice / motherhood and solitude without a trace.” And yet, her reflections are as evanescent as the temporary quiet she has purchased with her walk. “Our journeyings and dreams aren’t ours to keep. /… A puddle glimmers: mirror-fair, sky-deep.”

Her child, of course, is too young to remember these early experiences– “it takes some time to start to build a past” –but as they walk, the mother teaches him the words for things, and he repeats them as best he can. “We sing our song of mirrored syllables. / Each slip of sound invites its twin to play.” Here, the word “twin” refers, not only to the baby’s childish mispronunciation, but to the child’s own “twin“—i.e. the mother herself, when she was a girl. In “[a] hint of me, the girl I used to be,” we see a child who “kept her longings neatly tucked away,” who “snipped her steps, avoiding every crack” even as she looked over her shoulder at the unknown past. Now, as an adult, she is “still finding walking is a way of dreaming, / of wandering into memory’s hidden tracks.”

In one of heredity’s most beautiful gifts, the speaker reflects that her infant resembles her deceased grandfather: “There’s an ache and some solace in seeing / a face within a face, his image peering through.” With this insight, “A daily route grows newer by the day.” The poem proceeds through the mother’s thoughts: about discord and the sufferings of others, about memory and the pilgrimage that remains unfulfilled in this life. Near the end of her walk, as the daylight fades, she sees that “[h]eads bowed, the Lenten roses seem to pray.” When I was a new mother, I often pushed the stroller just like this so I could be alone with my thoughts, and these lines ring gorgeously true. Like the trajectory of an involuntary memory–a moment that we must pause and experience while it lasts–the poems of Anna Lewis’s debut collection gather and elevate, leaving sweetness behind as they ebb.

The O in the Air: Poems by Maryann Corbett (Franciscan University Press, 2023)

While Anna Lewis locates an image of the Passion in a flower, Maryann Corbett takes a further step back, asking, as she longs for roses to bloom again after a long winter, “[w]ho was the first to imagine prayers as blossoms?” Both poets reflect on their childhoods; but where Lewis assumes the persona of a young mother imagining a future for her child, Corbett looks back in maturity, divining the secrets of her elders and tracing their marks on her psyche. And around certain corners–even under our feet–we glimpse the hidden action of God.

The opening poem in Corbett’s collection describes a painting by Brueghel in which a foregrounded landscape contains a far-off scene from scripture embedded like a seed, inviting our gaze beyond visible reality toward the invisible sacred that illuminates it all:

It’s there, if you look past mere vision’s weakness.

The question, always haunted by its answer:

What if the world you learned in flame and darkness

Is apprehended only through these fancies?

What if the whole of it is heavenly?

The collection begins with speakers who struggle with puzzling questions from childhood. A truth might remain hidden because we were too young at the time to interpret what we have seen; but when we are older, the principal actors in the original drama often cannot explain. Thus, we are left with the overwriting of memory, sifting its choices and lapses. In Sorrowful Mysteries, the speaker is suddenly reminded of the frantic nighttime arrival of one of her parents’ friends: “[t]hrough a glass of years, darkly,” the scene from her childhood “gathers shape, then fades.” Clearly, someone has been driving drunk; perhaps the police have been called; there is a hint of impropriety— “She’s got a hell of a nerve, / writing us here” –but as to the substance of it, we do not know. “This is childhood’s essence,” Corbett says, “always to grope in the dark.” And

What the grip finds, it hoards

to worry in its fingers.

To tell, like rosary beads.

Here, the act of telling is synonymous with praying; you might say that the stories we make from our experiences are sanctified when we offer them to God.

In “Knowledge,” a daughter discovers her elderly mother’s previous marriage, which ended in divorce after her first husband virtually abandoned her during the war. The mother’s subsequent remarriage kept her from receiving communion until an annulment late in her life restored her to the Eucharist. In the midst of the daughter’s anger at the man who abandoned her mother—an act that distorted her childhood–the poet resolves to keep this family secret. After all, due to her mother’s cognitive decline, “[m]ine is the only memory / she has.”

Other truths of the past seem to lose their freshness, their appositeness, in modern-day contexts. In “Lavoro all’uncinetto,” an Italian grandmother’s precious lacework deteriorates over time into a mere means of financial support:

And holiness, subject to dust and ashes

(house dust, ash from my father’s cigarettes,

Impatient handling, children’s grubby hands)

Broke down.

…

What happens now? Who values patterned beauty?

Form on repeat, like rosaries or song?

Young children frequently appear in this collection, including one who joyfully sings out the word “cake!” during mass as the host is elevated: “Not quite the party I wanted,” the speaker says, “but it serves.” The “holy, wounded memory” that haunts the Eucharistic feast might be a personal one–or it might be the Passion, symbolized by the crucifix hanging over the altar.

In “Ardors,” Corbett turns toward the dying of the year, when nature surrenders itself to God in perfect trust that spring will come. The trees, however, seem to share our fallen state:

As if the sin of Adam took its toll

on trees, the maples stricken with the fall

burn in their sins. Red passion and proud gold,

their vanities float down like scraps of flame.

The days of burning leaf piles are over; “[n]ow the tumulus of compost / seethes” as the earth inevitably winds down, however slowly:

All our burning’s doomed,

even these fires where maple trees are found

still ardent after years, still unconsumed.

Other poems take a more whimsical tone. “To the Unknown God” declares an internet router to be the “newest of idols.” Meanwhile, the water-heater, “pure as a temple column, / went marble-cold to the landfill.” And yet we are

hauling new deities in

to a pantheon of deadbeats,

while we glance over our shoulders

at the town gates. Oh, they rattle!

The final poem of this middle section is “Hoarder”: “To get past stuff, it seems you have to die.” This line points us neatly toward the last part of the collection, which is full of endings. An older couple buys a burial plot; long-time neighborhood residents watch transitory students cast their belongings to the curb at the end of the semester; a popular drive-in is closed. In “Monuments”, Polish and German war dead achieve detente in a cemetery:

The snows of every winter white them out,

and with the summers, over all this absence

the great blade of the mower passes, sighing.

I saw myself in the poem “Praying Sleepless;” I am often beset by distraction (“What does adoring / feel like? Like fingers itching for a cell phone?”), and I sometimes pray best when I wake in the middle of the night. The speaker of the poem learns to rely on memorized vocal prayer, where she can

          fall, into the surf of repetition,

hail Mary, holy Mary; hidden behind

the wave machine of mantra, aiming at You

but slantwise, down the curl.

And like the speaker of “A Dream of Rooms,” I frequently dream of shapeshifting interiors that seem to grow bigger and more cluttered as I attempt to move through them. But here, the opposite dynamic is at play. The place of “stairs and doors” Anna Lewis evokes in “Childhood Home” is swept clean and bare in Corbett’s poem of loss:

The house, he knows, is theirs.

Doors open into rooms he’s never seen.

These rooms are empty and polished; they have somehow been “stripped of pointless things. … Their early indiscretions in deep pinks / and greens have been absolved.” And when the bereaved speaker awakes, he finds himself alone.

There are many more gorgeous poems I could have highlighted here. This is a collection to savor again and again.

Becoming Human: A Collection of Vignettes on Grief, Connection, and Longing by Natalie Kathryn Sanchez (2023)

There is something heartbreakingly close to the surface about the writing of a young person–someone who has not yet ceased to notice things, to generously give herself over to the visceral experience of nature or to a surge of emotion. Natalie Sanchez, the oldest of four children, suffered the sudden loss of her father when she was a senior in high school. This is her second book about grief.

Between the two books, as she says in her introduction, “I needed to leave space for the paradox: Grief is greater than me, intertwined with emotions beyond our language, and I am so much more than my grief. … This book is … an invitation to come back to ourselves time and time again.”

Sanchez does this by entering fully into the experience of grief as it arises in everyday life. Some of the reflections are essentially poems:

I have a recurring dream that you faked your death,

another where you are an absent father,

as if you chose to leave me.

And while she always longs for him– “[o]ur car conversations gave me an early recognition of experiencing time instead of counting it” –she tries to absorb herself in music or in a challenging bike ride that unlocks her euphoria. These lyrical prose essays are full of crisp images that have the savor of poetry. In “My Little Brother,” Sanchez longs to shield a child who must endure yet another funeral while “[t]he earth tosses and turns on its axis like an irritable insomniac, indecisive clouds parting and rejoining while we wait.” In “Sprinklers,” Sanchez remembers how, as a child, “fireflies lit curiosity between your palms.” “Dinner Table Fears” serves as a dispatch of sorts from the cusp of young womanhood to one’s future self, as a group of old high school friends gather to drink honey shrub cocktails, each of them “scared to disappoint another version of ourselves.”

But many of the pieces show us a young woman successfully navigating the world through her pain and helping others to do it. In “Choices,” Sanchez brilliantly nails the opening line: “[b]etween our first round of waters and the check, my brother chooses a college.” And in “My View from the Bleachers,” she suffers with a younger brother who is stuck on the sidelines even as she witnesses his growing resilience: “[f]rom the bleachers, I see a man emerging through his sprouting shoulders.” As she grasps after her fading memories of her father’s outline, she recognizes that she has taken on “[t]he shape of your absence, a soft semblance of what you left behind.”

Paul Sanchez passed away on March 9, 2018. How proud he must be of his Natalie now.

Showcasing Catholic writers with ties to Milwaukee, Part Three:

Letting in Air and Light by Teresa Tumminello Brader

Belle Point Press, 2023

Teresa Tumminello Brader lives and writes in New Orleans. But she attended Marquette University, so I hereby claim her for the city of Milwaukee as well. Letting in Air and Light, Brader’s lovely hybrid of fiction and memoir, turns on her discovery of a family secret. After an exhausting period of caring for her dying mother, Brader spreads out the February 26, 2010 edition of the newspaper to learn that her uncle, William J. Toye, has been arrested in an FBI raid for art forgery. And while the crime is sensational, Letting in Air and Light is mainly a story of family, mental illness, and home.

The voice of the book is divided, reflecting its dual purpose. As a memoirist, Brader must come to terms with her uncle’s exploitation of the name and reputation of Clementine Hunter, a self-taught Black Louisiana artist, and with her mother’s decision to keep the truth from her all this time. But as a novelist, Brader peers into the mirror of life, teasing out the good, the true, and the beautiful; and in this vein, she skillfully ventriloquizes the thoughts and feelings of her family members, who become characters or even narrators themselves.

There is something meta-fictional about the memoir-style entries, which roughly alternate with the fictionalized accounts. Toye is extraordinarily talented, and early in his career, he supports himself with set design and architectural work–even posing, Zelig-like, as a symphony conductor because a famous musician shares the family name. The book’s title refers to an early childhood memory in which Teresa sits on her uncle’s lap, punching out the windows and doors in an architectural model he has made out of balsa wood. “I could use this punching out of windows and doors as a symbol of destruction,” Brader tells us. “Or I could offer it as a metaphor for letting in air and light to an enclosed structure, one that my mother tried to keep that way.” Specifically, we learn that Toye was first accused in the nineteen-seventies, but Teresa was never told. In the fictionalized account, she searches the house for the funnies one day after school, and no one will explain why that day’s newspaper (which contained an account of her uncle’s crimes) has already been discarded. This dual structure avoids the trap of authorial intrusion while enacting the process of reflection and judgment that adults eventually bring to bear on their childhoods.

Brader beautifully evokes her grandparents’ double-shotgun house, where much of the story takes place: “the red-and-white checkerboard tablecloth. … looked as though someone were constantly passing a damp washcloth over it.” In the dining room, young Teresa plays with her aunt Helen’s typewriter and studies her record collection; in the front room, she helps herself to the books. The fictional sections are organized according to the changing rhythms of home: “A Starter House,” “A Shotgun House,” “An Opera House,” “Asylums,” et cetera. Meanwhile, Brader’s treatment of William Toye moves between empathy, wonder, unease, and shame. Here, young William is experiencing an early psychotic break:

The school’s pigeon-gray walls moved inward, closer and closer. Billy tried to quicken the pace, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. He tried to shrink into himself, but he was already as thin as a blade. He scuttled sideways like a crab…. Bumped on both sides, he collapsed, his knees folding like the Hotch Potch character that taught colonial children their ABCs. Scrunched into a ball, resembling no letter from any alphabet, he went blank.

The story proceeds in a series of beautifully rendered anecdotes, milestones, and tragedies of family life; but as Brader matures, she is caught between her duty to her mother and her desire to learn the truth. After her mother’s death, Brader travels to Lafayette to hear a talk given by Randy Deaton, the FBI agent who investigated her uncle’s case. She has decided in advance not to reveal her family connection to anyone, reflecting that that if her mother were still alive, she might never have attended at all.

Once I’d returned from the talk, she would have wanted to know all about it.  Ironically, she didn’t like things being kept from her. I would have told her what I learned. I would have answered her questions. I would’ve been hoping to help break the chain of secrecy, the one that breeds more secrecy and grows unwarranted shame.

The FBI agent passes around one of her uncle’s forgeries, and

[t]ime feels wobbly again, the surreality of my situation intensifying. I came to the talk with no preconceptions as to an outcome, but I almost feel as if a dream-pencil appeared in my hand and I drew these happenings. My mind churns with all the things I could say.  …. I think of myself as a toddler sitting on Uncle Bill’s lap, as his forgery is now sitting on mine.

In the end, Brader chooses to treat her family with mercy. Letting in Air and Light recalls Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir of New Orleans, The Yellow House, in which a matriarch’s efforts to patch up the flaws in her house enact the struggle to keep a disparate family whole.

Literary Historical Fiction

The Dead of Winter, by Paul David Bauer

Vol. 4 in The Coldest Winter in a Century

One of the great privileges of my life is to serve as the first reader for my husband Paul, who has just published The Dead of Winter, the fourth of seven planned volumes in his epic series The Coldest Winter in a Century. Coldest Winter follows four characters during the second World War: Captain (and later Major) Ed Rybowski, a Jewish company commander in the 1^st Battalion of the 22^nd Infantry Regiment; Ed’s college friend Billy Randolph, son of Virginia’s senior senator and an intelligence officer at SHAEF; Billy’s younger sister Mary, a hard-working Washington insider and Ed’s soon-to-be ex-wife; and Ed’s former girlfriend Cathy Quinn, a nurse from a big Irish Catholic family who is caring for wounded soldiers on the home front. Coldest Winter takes us into the heart of the European conflict via the Hürtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, and the prisoner of war camps (in a remarkable passage in the third book, Be Not Afraid, Billy Randolph visits Treblinka under the guidance of Ukrainian-Jewish novelist and journalist Vassily Grossman). Meanwhile, Mary Randolph is sent on a mission to Alaska to reconnoiter a site for a dam—a massive New Deal project destined never to be completed. And Cathy, who has married the wrong man on impulse, keeps an eye on her nursing cohort and her colorful brothers while making frequent confessions.

Coldest Winter is a brilliantly-researched passion project that sits somewhere between Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series and Hilary Mantel’s Henry VIII trilogy. The story has been the undercurrent of our marriage: when I first met Paul, he was writing what would later become Mad River Run, a prequel to Coldest Winter set in Princeton, New York, and Vermont in December of 1939. Here, we meet the characters in their idealistic youth. Billy, who harbors Communist sympathies despite his patrician origins, dreams of fighting in the Spanish Civil War with the Lincoln Brigade, while Ed, who is Jewish and from Brooklyn, broods over the ongoing German invasion of Poland. As a young person, Billy has many flaws—he’s impulsive, grandiose, and a womanizer to boot—but he is utterly loyal to Ed, the smartest person he knows. In Mad River Run, Billy leads Ed into all sorts of misadventures, beginning with some pool shark action at Princeton’s Ivy Club and ending with an ill-advised episode of night skiing at Mad River in Vermont. Meanwhile, Ed tries to come to terms with the violent death of his father, Wladislaw Rybowski, whose true business Ed does not yet understand.

Through it all, Ed is our polestar, the figure around whom all the disparate characters revolve. His voice is laconic, introspective, sometimes fierce. Here’s a sample from the early pages of Mad River Run, in which Billy and Ed, both lacrosse players, have just finished a punishing afternoon run and are lying under what Billy calls the “Tree of Doom:”

Randolph said to concentrate on the sky to forget the pain. Billy was always talking that way. Announcing theories. Commanding commitments. Calling in the chits of manhood. It was his manner of friendship. Looking up through the black branches of the old tree, he said the late afternoon sky was like some girls’ eyes when the music stopped, an expectant blue, “full of potential.”

There was always potential in blue-eyed girls for boys like Billy Randolph, Ed thought.

Life will darken in time for all of these characters; both the male and female protagonists must confront the physical and moral perils of the times in which they live. Here is Mary in Alaska, after having suggested that a Russian flyer might have revealed something interesting to her while in his cups:

It was the disease of government that people often pretended to possess more information than they really did; it was a badge of status in Washington to be “in the know.” She had always despised people like that, peripheral nobodies who claimed to have inside dope. They were dangerous too: loose lips, sink ships and all that. But she had fallen into the same trap, pretending to know something about Hipp’s shipment. And now she had probably put someone else on the hot seat to boot. It was pride, nothing more, and she felt herself redden with embarrassment.

From the beginning, Mary Randolph is beautiful, brilliant, ambitious, and tough; and one wonders whether, like Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch, she is destined for some great act of self-sacrificing love. And Cathy Quinn will someday discover what an object of devotion she herself has been. The Coldest Winter in a Century will immerse you in some of the twentieth century’s most notorious conflicts, along with a few harrowing episodes that have only recently come to light. You’ll be eagerly awaiting the next installment—and lucky for me, I’ll be reading it first.

This Month: Celebrating Small Presses Doing Great Things

In the Morning, The City is the Prairie by Rob Roensch (Belle Point Press, 2023)

One of many things to admire about this novel is that there are almost no flashbacks. In the course of a single week, we travel swiftly over a narrative surface that’s almost as flat as the Oklahoma prairie—or as the apparently unexamined life of Matt Bennet, who has dropped out of college and quit his band to work full-time at Costco. One evening, Matt comes home to find that his parents have evicted him from his room to make way for his dying aunt Becky. In a dislocation that mirrors the loss of his personal compass, he is welcome to sleep on the living room floor with the dog.

Becky’s arrival has also divided Matt’s parents, who argue frequently about money: “[my] father and mother don’t notice me. Their antlers are stuck together. There is sweat on their faces.” Matt’s father harbors a deep resentment against his dying sister, who has been in and out of jail over the years. “You don’t know what she did,” he tells Matt. “Some things can’t be forgiven.” But Matt’s mother is determined to bring about a reconciliation between them even as she struggles to provide Becky with dignified care. Meanwhile, Matt’s younger sister Sylvie, who has usurped his guitar, is writing songs and taking an exceptional interest in the problems of the world. But Matt is laconic and quick to make the obvious joke. This doesn’t help his relationship with his girlfriend Jane, who has joined a statewide teachers’ strike for better pay. When Matt shows up to meet Jane at a demonstration at the state capitol, he is alarmed at the distance he’s allowed to develop between them. “Why don’t I know who she’s talking to?” he wonders. “Why don’t I have any idea what she’s saying?”

Part of the trouble might be that Matt spends much of his free time getting high with Connor, a weirdly brilliant young man who claims to be seeking the intersection of poetry and capitalism. Connor takes Matt up in a skyscraper one night to watch a lightning storm from inside a darkened restaurant: “to build something tall,” Connor says, “you have to conceive of something taller; it’s a metaphor for America; it’s a metaphor for capitalism; it’s a metaphor for how to live.” It is Matt, however, who needs to know how to live; and in his oddball way, Connor is trying to help. He urges Matt to come work for him, an offer Matt never takes up.

But Matt is not feckless, or not entirely so. Though he has numbed himself in response to some disappointment, Matt remains generally cheerful. When Sheila, a visiting nurse, finds him asleep at ten a.m. on the living room floor, Matt takes her ribbing in stride. “She smiles, as if she understands how I can’t help agreeing with people I’m talking to, and at inappropriate moments.” And while Aunt Becky is salty–she asks Matt to buy her some beer, and she can always tell when he’s high–her frailty has a humanizing effect on the whole family. Here is Matt, assisting his mother in putting her back to bed:

I lay her down, trying not to break the surface tension of the lake of the bed. I’ve never tried to be so gentle before. “That hurts,” says Aunt Becky. … She holds one arm at an angle, like it’s stuck in a cramp. My mother shoulders me out of the way. She has a pill pinched between two fingers like she just plucked it from a flower; she dips to Becky, slips the pill into the corner of her mouth, and whacks me with her other hand. “Water,” she says. I grab the flowered tumbler from the side table and pass it to my mother, who holds it to Becky’s lips with a firm, impersonal, ceremonial air, as if it was communion wine.

This is beautiful writing; and while the Bennets may have their problems, the family clearly has good bones. Matt and Sylvie absorb Aunt Becky into the household without complaint. And though Matt is underemployed, he shows a surprising attentiveness to the simple, satisfying aspects of his job:

I love the weight of a roll of nickels best of all the coin rolls. They are also the best coin, not only heaviest but also somehow the roundest. I love the process of changing the receipt roll. I love when an order comes down to an interesting number–$57 even, $77.97, $301.03. I love knowing bananas’ number. I love having the good zapper. … I tell myself I am practicing mindfulness.

I tried making a similar list immediately after I read this; I wasn’t nearly as particular or as successful as Matt. Despite his tendency to blurt out something ridiculous while withholding what really matters, Matt’s humility, his basic goodness, are very appealing.

Matt’s father finally tells him the tragic reason he can’t forgive Becky, but it takes time for this revelation to do its work. “’I told you the story, okay?’” he says. “‘You know the story. Congratulations. Can we watch golf now? Can I have a moment’s rest?’” In a significant exchange, Matt asks his sister Sylvie what they should do about it. Sylvie is playing the guitar. “She’s in the state of distracted concentration. The chord goes up, the chord goes down, broken. … ‘Being present is the first step,’” she says. Later, Matt admits, “I know exactly what I used to think the goal of being alive was: …guitars at the volume of good screaming, the drum like your own heartbeat filling your ribcage….” But now, “[t]here’s a voice speaking I can’t quite understand.” Meanwhile, the teacher protests at the capitol are heating up, and soon, the idealistic Sylvie is deeply involved. When a crisis occurs, Matt and Connor must take the lead. Here at last is Matt’s chance to figure out his vocation–and maybe even find his way back to Jane.   

Roensch’s understated, evocative descriptions of Oklahoma brought to mind a passage from Willa Cather’s My Antonia, a book I first read in the suburbs of Omaha, where I grew up:

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

In Omaha as in Oklahoma City, we have built a great many Costcos and Taco Bells since then. But there is something restorative in the way Roensch depicts the self-healing topography of the prairie:

None of the buildings in Oklahoma City are old; even its ruins are obviously temporary–either the neighborhood will ride a wave of oil-boom investment and be reinvented, or the wind and weeds will overcome everything. The unpredictable, enormous sky and the gently troubled flatness of the land are the only true permanents.

This deeper vision will take Matt Bennet a long way beyond Costco.

N.B. I’ve read two books now from Belle Point Press, and I’m deeply impressed so far with the quality of their titles. I encourage you to check out Child Craft, a beautiful collection of flash fiction from Amy Cipolla Barnes. You might also dip into one of their prose series bundles or any of their poetry collections and chapbooks. There are some fine authors represented here.

It’s Thirty Seconds to Midnight. Where is God?

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

The shadow of doomsday hangs over Paul Murray’s new novel, The Bee Sting, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In the aftermath of a financial crash, Ireland is getting hotter and hotter; there are horrible floods, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. In response, Dickie Barnes, who manages the family’s once prosperous but now failing car dealership, joins his friend Victor out in the woods adjacent to his property, where they spend their days digging a well and fortifying an old shed into a bunker, hoping to fend off their ill-prepared neighbors when disaster inevitably comes.

The Bee Sting is told in a series of exquisite novellas, each from the point of view of a different member of the Barnes family. In the first, teenage Cass struggles with questions of friendship and being liked; in the second, her younger brother PJ must evade a bully who wants to extract an impossible sum in repayment for an alleged offense at the family’s car dealership. PJ texts back and forth with an online gaming friend who encourages him to run away, leaving us virtually certain that this “friend” is no child at all. Meanwhile, Cass and PJ’s parents are obsessed with their own problems: while Dickie works away at the bunker, his wife Imelda resentfully sells off her belongings on eBay to help pay the family’s expenses. In the children’s accounts, Imelda is little more than a thoughtless consumer; at best, you might say she is bored. And Cass has discovered that there are no photographs of her parents’ wedding, presumably because her mother was too vain to take off her wedding veil after she’d been sung on the eye by a bee on her way to the church.

But when Imelda takes over the narration in the third part, we learn that a bee sting on her wedding day is the least of her worries. As a young girl, Imelda is rescued from a very hard background by Rose, who has the gift of second sight. Imelda initially falls in love with Dickie’s brother Frank, a local football hero and the darling of his parents. She prevails upon Rose to tell her whether there will be sun on her wedding day–only to learn that there will be a ghost at her wedding, a ghost whose identity Imelda tragically mistakes.

When Frank is killed in a car accident, Dickie and Imelda eventually turn to each other in their grief–though nearly everyone tries to warn them off, including Dickie’s mother, who offers Imelda her insight on the relationship between the two brothers:

Though Frank was younger Dickie idolized him

No She caught herself He didn’t idolize him In fact I’m not sure he even liked him very much But everyone else liked Frank and that’s what Dickie wanted for himself He wanted to be the boy that everyone liked But he was very clever and very complicated and you can’t be clever and complicated and have everyone like you That is just not how it works And he ended up making himself very sad …

I just wonder what kind of a life you see the two of you having together

But Imelda is determined to go through with the wedding, and, having lost Dickie’s brother, she longs to see him appear in fulfillment of Rose’s prophesy. As she and Dickie take the floor for their first dance, Imelda sees her own hazy reflection in the mirror and realizes what she has done:

She was the one Rose had seen in her vision She was the ghost

A leftover from another life A remnant of something that was no more That was her Haunting the feast

Meanwhile, Dickie, who is filled with self-loathing after engaging in homosexual relationships in college, is desperately trying to settle the ghosts of his past. When he takes Frank’s place and marries Imelda, he tells himself that things are back in order: he will be the Frank that Frank was meant to be. But such thinking, of course, is inherently disordered, and instead of setting things to rights, Dickie is succumbing to darkness. He has begun spending his nights as well as his days out in the woods:

evening arrives, in the sudden, surprise-attack way it’s been doing all week as autumn takes hold, seeming to bloom from the air in dark-blue clouds that soak into it moment by moment until it is drenched, the air, the day, it is saturated in deep blue, like the blue clay dust that fills the well, immersing bodies, trees, the van, the tents, then slowly sealing them up within it.

Things begin to come to a head in Dublin, where Cass, like her father, attends Trinity College. Dickie makes his way there on the night of a terrible storm, having used an alias to try and reconnect with Willie, his former lover. Willie, meanwhile, is a candidate for office, and Cass and her friends hear him speak about climate change:

to face up to reality we first need to set aside all of these inventions and disguises we’ve been so busy accumulating. We need to take off our masks. … We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end. … The sad truth is that right now, at the worst possible moment, we’re being deluged in new ways to hide.

But even as Willie proclaims our urgent need to drop our false selves and wake up to our danger, his suggestion that we alone can save humanity reveals the essential hubris of the doomsday cult that disfigures our proper concern for sustainability and good stewardship. After all, we are not God, nor did we make the world. But perhaps Murray is simply acknowledging here the role of original sin and free will in the present calamity.

An awareness of the fall is also at the root of Dickie’s lifelong fear of the apocalypse. “Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric,” he reflects. “Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterward gets around to pretending they didn’t know.” But Dickie believes that the proper solution is to withdraw from society altogether. If he can just take his family into the bunker, he thinks,

The world, the fallen world, will fall away. The toxicity that you were part of, that you made them be part of too, will be gone. The four of you will be de-worlded: no more school, news, internet: instead only the straight reality of the four walls around you, the sky overhead, the food you have grown from the soil.

This supposed idyll is disrupted when a former lover of Dickie’s threatens to post pornographic images of him online. Dickie confides in Victor, who proposes killing the man when he comes to the bunker to pick up his hush money. In Victor’s eyes, Dickie confronts pure evil:

You don’t speak—you can’t speak; nor can you look away from the splayed gaze, the eyes that angle off into other dimensions, leaving between them a space of pure emptiness, a terrible place of darkness, where you seem to see yourself, ungrounded, null.

And yet, Dickie kneels down near the bunker to wait for his blackmailer, just as he has regularly knelt in church over the years. “But how long since you prayed?” he asks himself. “Prayed and expected to be answered? Or even listened to? … Now in place of the Cross is the Bunker. You can still just about see it, sepulchral in the gloom.”

But there is a moment when Dickie could draw back: someone appears to him, someone he at first takes to be Victor.

You don’t have to do this, Dickie, he says. There is another way. … Admit what you did, her persists. Tell Maurice, tell Imelda, tell the kids. …They’ll find a way to understand. Imelda too, even her. That is what love is. It is bigger than facts. It is bigger than the sum of what you have done. You can be done with that false life, take the good things with you. Start again.

But Dickie refuses to lay down his mask as Willie has counseled, and tragedy follows. What does this say about all his future-proofing, his attempt to ward off the end of the world?

One of the things I loved best about The Bee Sting is the revolution it enacts in our perception of Imelda. At first, she appears to be little more than a gossip and a compulsive shopper. But notwithstanding her refusal to punctuate, Imelda is by far the best storyteller in the family; and despite her tragic history—the worst of which is not revealed until the very end—she tries hard to resist temptation and do the right thing. And there is hope, too, in the relationship between brother and sister. As Cass and PJ make their way home in a blinding storm, Cass asks her little brother for a distracting science fact. He tells her that, due to the flourishing biome in our gut, our bodies contain more bacteria cells than human cells. “People get so hung up on are they this kind of person or that,” PJ says.

But if you have ten times more not-human cells than human cells, then, in a way, you’re not even you. It kind of takes the pressure off…. I feel like if people knew they were mostly bacteria it would solve a lot of problems.

Cass and PJ enter the woods on this fateful night like Hansel and Gretl, trying to find their way back to the parents who have abandoned them. And this is fitting, because throughout the novel, an old folk tale has been in tension with Dickie’s doomsday narrative. A man finds himself alone in the woods at night without food or shelter. All at once, he hears the sounds of music, laughter, and dancing; a door has opened up in the hillside, and when he steps in, the celebrants all insist they’ve been waiting for him. The traveler enjoys an evening of good food and drink. But when he wakes up, one hundred years have passed, and all his loved ones are dead. PJ has been troubled for a while now by an idea that was suggested to him by the movie Pet Sematary: if you bring someone back from the dead, they might be changed for the worse. He has tried very hard to resurrect the loving father he once knew. But when they get to the woods, what—or who—will he find in Dickie’s place?

Prizewinners

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (Liveright Publishing Corp., 2022). Translated by Angela Rodel.

This year’s International Booker Prize winner, Time Shelter, recalls the work of W.G. Sebald, who often wrote from the point of view of a traveler receiving the stories of enigmatic and suffering post-war characters. Sebald’s great novel Austerlitz was reportedly inspired by a picture postcard of a proud-looking young boy in a white satin page costume that Sebald found in a secondhand shop. In Sebald’s novel, the young Austerlitz escapes Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport just ahead of Hitler’s invasion. As an adult, Austerlitz wanders through Europe seeking information about his lost parents. “[I had been] keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was….”

Similarly, in Time Shelter, an enigmatic psychiatrist named Gaustine evokes a past world for his suffering clients using artifacts that he gleans from the secondhand shops. The “time shelter” of the book’s title refers to a Swiss sanitorium intended to comfort a growing number of people who are losing their memories—perhaps including the narrator, who is known mainly by his (and the author’s) initials, G.G. Gaustine’s clinic is a hospice facility in an age of dementia—or perhaps a return to the cocoon of an imagined past for a people who have determined that Europe has no future.

The Zurich apartment Gaustine uses as his clinic has been decorated in the style of the nineteen-sixties, and here, G.G. encounters a red Olivetti typewriter. “Immediately I wanted—my fingers wanted—to pound something out, to feel the resistance of the keys, to hear the bell ding at the end of a line….” He remembers hitting random keys as a child: “A possible code, which we will never crack.” G.G. determines that his highest calling shall be to scour the world for similar nostalgic items, and the two team up to expand the clinic. Soon, the whole building is full of suites dedicated to various time periods.

And yet something is wrong with Gaustine. Having announced at the beginning of the novel that “[on] September 1, 1939, early in the morning, came the end of human time,” Gaustine takes off for central Europe; it appears from his letters that he has gone back to the late nineteen-thirties, where the second World War is looming. G.G. is left to run the clinic while Gaustine becomes “a vagrant in time, if you will.” As the time-shelter contagion spreads, all of Europe holds a grand referendum in which each country chooses to return to a particular decade of the twentieth century. Soon, a long spine of the 1980s stretches from France into Germany; it’s the 1970s in Scandinavia and Portugal; and a streak of the 90s runs through the former Eastern bloc countries. The narrator’s home country of Bulgaria leaves the EU, and the old socialist dictatorship soon descends. G.G., who is visiting Sofia, has seen this story before, and he gets out two days before the border closes: “It’s nice to know your home country so well that you can leave it shortly before the trap springs.” But in characteristically neutral fashion, Switzerland chooses to return to the date of the referendum. This is a way of saying that “I don’t dance to your time—for a certain time, at least. But I can measure it out for you, if you’re willing to pay, I’ll time it with a stopwatch…and I’ll sell you clocks, I’ll guard your paintings, rings, diamonds…if anyone experienced severe claustrophobia from the past, Switzerland could offer them temporary asylum. A shelter.”

As G.G. tells the story, he begins to wonder if Gaustine might be a creature of his own imagination: “I don’t recall when exactly he started to become more real than me.“  The doubling of author and narrator, narrator and character is memorialized in a quote from Borges and I: “I do not know which of us has written this page.”

Near the end, in an echo of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, the narrator is losing words, even letters; his thoughts shuffle backwards until his childhood seems much more real to him than the recent past. “Somewhere,” he says, “the past exists as a house or a street that you’ve left for a short while, for five minutes, and you’ve found yourself in a strange city. … The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there.” This astonishing book, which reads like a hymn to the end of the world, is so stuffed with quotable aphorisms that I could hardly keep up.

Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books, 2022)

This novel, which shares the 2023 Pulitzer Prize with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, is divided into four overlapping novellas ostensibly written by four different people. The opening story, “Bonds,” recalls a favorite novel of mine, Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World. In seeking to form his daughter’s brilliant mind, Leopold Brevoort succumbs to the study of strange, occult practices and dubious theologies; soon, he speaks a nonsense made of fragments of various languages, and his writing becomes a series of meaningless symbols. Meanwhile, Leopold’s daughter Helen develops almost supernatural intellectual powers—she can recite passages from memory after hearing them once, even alternating line by line between two poems or tracts, forward or backwards, a parlor trick that her mother exploits to her social advantage. On the eve of the Great War, the impoverished family removes to Europe to depend on the kindness of wealthy friends. As Helen walks alone for the first time in a silent town, she makes a discovery about herself. “She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.” The Brevoorts are extracted from Europe as the fighting begins by a wealthy and pompous young man who serves as the romantic envoy of a reclusive New York financier, leaving the now-addled father behind in a Swiss sanitorium. {Hint at Helen’s illness.}

That last aside of mine is an allusion to the second novella, “My Life,” purporting to be Andrew Bevel’s self-serving memoir of his career as a wealthy financier whose market manipulations may have induced the crash of 1929. His story, which is heavily salted with such editorial notes as “give two or three examples,” is eerily similar to the story of “Bonds”—but the names and point of view have changed, along with the details of the illness that takes Andrew’s wife Helen—or, rather, Mildred. Here, the brilliant Helen becomes docile and childlike. As Bevel writes of his wife’s final illness, he reminds himself to include “[examples] of Mildred’s innocent wisdom during this period. Her thoughts on nature and God. Our last walk in the woods. Sweet incident with an animal.” This is a breathtaking risk for a writer in that the second novella often reads like amateurish drivel. But the risk is calculated—and, in my view, wildly successful. Bevel’s omissions always reveal his personal failings, along with the lies he is telling himself.

A woman named Ida Partenza takes over the story in “A Memoir, Remembered.” After a successful career as a novelist, Ida returns in her old age to the former Central Park home of Andrew Bevel at 87^th and Fifth, which is now a museum. As a young woman, Ida applied for a job as a typist turned amanuensis turned ghostwriter– an occupation she will keep secret from her anarchist father, who works as a typesetter, and her indifferent boyfriend, a failed journalist. When Bevel asks Ida why she wants the job, she surprises herself by replying that money is “the universal commodity by which we measure all other commodities. And if money is the god among commodities, this…is its high temple.”

Ida’s main task in drafting Bevel’s memoir is to refute what Bevel believes is the libelous portrait of his wife and family in “Bonds,” a popular novel loosely based on his life. Ida begins by reading Vanner’s book, and her reaction might well be an expression of the aesthetic of Trust: “It was my first time reading something that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. … Lucidity, [Vanner] seemed to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning…. Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing.” But in an effort to align reality with his own preference, Bevel is determined to destroy all remembrance, not just of the offending book, but of its author, Harold Vanner. “For the first time,” Ida says, ‘it occurred to me that I should be afraid.”

Ida develops a troubling loyalty to her unrepentant capitalist employer even as she attempts to uncover the real Mildred Bevel, a task at which she only partly succeeds. Despite Bevel’s admonitions, Ida sneaks into Mildred’s room: “there was a monastic sort of calm here—what, in retrospect, I recognize as a modern, austerely avant-garde atmosphere.” At the library, Ida gains access to some of Mildred’s papers. But there is “something runic” about Mildred’s handwriting, and to unpack this code, Ida must draw on the skills of reading forward and backward that were first attributed to Helen Brevoort in “Bonds.” She tells her father that, as a typist, she “had come to experience time differently. The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited. He could relate to this: as he fed one piece of type into the composing stick, he was always spotting the nick and face of the next one. … He also told me the biggest influence of his work in his life had been that it had taught him to see the world backward.” Ida finds Mildred’s blotting paper: “I thought of my father and his inverted truth.”

The final entry in the book is “Futures,” a slim journal Mildred kept during her final illness. Here, Ida discovers the secret that Andrew Bevel so desperately sought to conceal in the memoir she wrote for him. Trust is in large part a critique of capital and its monstrous effect on its most devoted adherents. But it is also the story of a brilliant woman whose true essence eludes all the people who claim to love her.